BGG.con Game #2

I've designed another game for BGG.con, even though I won't be going to the con unless some kind soul hands me the airfare. I've passed the idea on to Aldie, but have yet to hear if he will be implementing it, as it involves him having to print the cards again like he did last year, and they already have a lot of extra work to do.

Like the first game (Piratenhandler on BGG), this game had to fulfill the following conditions:

- Playable by 6-700 people simultaneously over the course of 3 days. Playable also by a fraction of those who will be interested.
- Don't have to see every card to play the game.
- Involves strategy, not simply chance (like a lottery).
- Easy to create, understand, and play. Doesn't require extensive (*cough* any) playtesting.
- Fosters fun and socializing, doesn't require rules brokering.

This year there was one other additional criteria: easy to score. I spent 3 hours totaling the scores of the 56 participants last year, and I didn't think any of the administrators were going to want to do that this year.

Core Design (#1):

- Object of the game: Help return Aldie's games to the game library.
- Each player gets 3 random cards out of three sets of 1000 cards. Each card features a single game on one side of the card. On the other side of the card is a list of games in a bundle.
- You win by handing in to an admin a) a card with a game bundle with b) all the games that fit into the bundle. The first N players win prizes (subsequent players receive lesser prizes such as geekgold).

Ideally, I would like people to combine efforts, trade cards with each other, trade information, use the cards as betting objects in other games played, etc...

The elegance of this design is that I can make the game bundles larger or smaller in order to make the game harder or easier. Furthermore, I can arrange to have only N number of possible victors. Furthermore, games can belong to more than one game bundle.

While I like this idea, I thought of another version of the idea which may be even easier to implement:

Core Design (#2):

- Object of the game: Help return Aldie's games to the game library.
- Each player gets 3 random cards out of three sets of 1000 cards. Each card features a single game on one side of the card.
- On the wall of the game room are five lists of games missing from the library, each rather long.
- You win by handing in to an admin as many cards as possible in one or more of the lists. The player who hands in the longest list of games on each list wins.

The benefit that this design has over the first design is that it's slightly easier for more people to play, and might also be less frustrating. On the other hand, it's likely that the winner of one list will probably be the winner of more than one. To avoid that, you could specify that each player can only submit to one list.

Anyway, let's see if Aldie bites.

Yehuda